Leonard Sax is an American psychologist and a practicing family physician. He is best known as the author of three books for parents: Boys Adrift, Girls on the Edge, and Why Gender Matters. According to his web site, he is currently employed as a physician at a healthcare facility in Chester County Pennsylvania, where he also resides.
Life and career
Sax grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he was the third of three children. Sax graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in biology. He completed the combined M.D.-Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. His Ph.D. is in psychology. He completed the 3-year residency in family practice at Lancaster General Hospital in 1989. In 1990, he founded Poolesville Family Practice, a primary care practice in Montgomery County, Maryland. He began an extended sabbatical from medical practice in June 2008. In December 2013, he returned to full-time clinical practice as an employee of Lancaster General Health. He has written several books and held workshops at institutions such as University of Wisconsin and First Presbyterian Church (Houston).
Sax's views on gender
Sax's work has attracted most attention, positive and negative, for his views on gender. Broadly, he supports the notion of innate differences between the sexes, and advocates parenting children differently based on their gender. A 7 March 2005, cover story for Time magazine included this statement:"Until recently, there have been two groups of people: those who argue sex differences are innate and should be embraced and those who insist that they are learned and should be eliminated by changing the environment. Sax is one of the few in the middle – convinced that boys and girls are innately different and that we must change the environment so differences don't become limitations."
On his web site, Sax says that he wrote Boys Adrift and Girls on the Edge because he is concerned about "... a growing proportion of girls who are anxious, depressed, and tired; girls who can tell you a great deal about what they do but not so much about who they are. Likewise, we find a growing proportion of boys who are disengaged not only from school but from the real world. Those boys are comfortable in the virtual world, where they play their online video games, and/or surf the net for photographs of girls."
Why Gender Matters (2005 edition) Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned on his blog, Language Log, many of the claims which Sax made in his first book Why Gender Matters. Liberman asserted that there were serious problems with Sax's claims about sex differences in hearing, vision, and connections between emotions and language. Sax wrote to Liberman, and, receiving no reply, in October 2010 on the website of Why Gender Matters, Sax acknowledged that points in his book were "out-of-date or inaccurate" and that his work, which was initially published in 2005, has been clarified by studies published by third parties in 2007 and 2009. He now provides updated references to scholarly papers on these three issues and he "expanded, updated, and corrected" the discussion of sex differences in hearing with a new article, "Sex Differences in Hearing", in October 2010; and the discussion of sex differences in vision is updated in Chapter 5 of his book Girls on the Edge. Sax provides a detailed refutation of Liberman and other critics in two appendices to the 2017 edition of Why Gender Matters, titled "Sex Differences in Hearing" and "Sex Differences in Vision."
Conservative opinion columnist David Brooks calls Dr. Sax's first book, Why Gender Matters, "... a lucid guide to male and female brain differences."
Boys Adrift (2007 edition) Dr. Sax's second book, Boys Adrift, was reviewed by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in December 2007. According to the review, Boys Adrift is "powerfully and persuasively presented", and provides "excellent and informative references and information". The review concludes that "Boys Adrift is at its strongest in providing practical advice to parents about how to increase their sons' academic motivation; how to set appropriate limits on video game use; and how to protect their sons from the potential harm of psychotropic medications and environmental estrogens. Boys Adrift is at its weakest in supporting the thesis that there is an epidemic of unmotivated and underachieving young men."